The actual anniversary of the queen’s ascent to the throne in 1952 was February 6, but the main celebrations were deferred to a weekend in the warmer month of June. On June 3 a flotilla of some 1,000 barges sailed down the River Thames. The following day, the first of a special two-day public holiday, an open-air concert was staged in front of Buckingham Palace, the queen’s London residence; on June 5 a service of thanksgiving was held in London’s Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Although the weather was far from ideal (it rained on the flotilla), the crowds were large, and the mood was generally festive.

The same combination of mixed weather, large crowds, and upbeat mood greeted the Olympic Games, from the spectacular opening ceremony on July 27 in a newly built stadium in a previously derelict area of East London to the final day of the Paralympic Games on September 9. Seats for almost every event for both sets of Games were sold out. Most commentators agreed with Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, who described the staging of the Games as “absolutely fabulous.”

One big beneficiary of the Games was Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London. In May he had secured a second four-year term when he narrowly defeated his Labour rival, Ken Livingstone. Despite (and, perhaps, partly because of) various widely reported transgressions in his private life, Johnson was greeted almost everywhere he went more like a pop star than a politician. His thick mop of blond hair and imaginative use of language helped him to stand out. An apparently bumbling manner concealed—and, indeed, made more palatable to the public—a sharp mind and a vast ambition. The Olympics provided a stage on which he was able to project his personality. Opinion polls showed him to be far more popular than Prime Minister David Cameron, the Conservatives’ party leader.

Cameron had a difficult year. At the start of 2012, the Conservatives trailed the opposition Labour Party only narrowly in the opinion polls, and Cameron himself was more popular—or, more strictly, less unpopular—than Ed Miliband, Labour’s leader. Continuing economic weakness and an unpopular budget, however, caused Labour’s lead to widen to about 10% and Cameron’s personal approval rating to dip further. In May the Conservatives suffered heavy losses in local government elections.

In September Cameron sought to give his cabinet a more voter-friendly look by moving four ministers who had received widespread criticism: Andrew Lansley (health secretary), whose reforms of the National Health Service had been attacked by almost every professional body representing doctors and nurses; Jeremy Hunt (culture secretary), who many thought had become too closely involved with leading figures in News International and who faced criminal charges related to phone hacking and the bribing of police officers; Kenneth Clarke (justice secretary), whose resistance to right-wing policies on Europe as well as crime made him unpopular with large sections of his party and the media; and Justine Greening (transportation secretary), who opposed Cameron’s decision to reverse his previous policy and take a fresh look at whether London’s main airport, Heathrow, should be expanded. All four ministers remained in the government but in new positions in which Cameron hoped that they would be less troublesome.

One month later Cameron was forced to make another change when Andrew Mitchell, the government’s chief whip, resigned after he admitted to having sworn at London police officers who were guarding the entrance to Downing Street, the location of the prime minister’s offices and official home. Though Mitchell acknowledged that he had shouted a profanity at the policemen, he denied that he called them “plebs” (a word, derived from Latin, meaning lower class or uncouth). The dispute, arguably trivial in itself, revived the toxic charge by some that leading Conservatives were upper-class snobs who treated working-class people with contempt. It was a charge that Cameron, as party leader, had gone to great lengths to refute. The episode also added to pressure on the police when evidence surfaced in December that some details of their account may have been fabricated.

Cameron also faced difficulties with his coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats. The coalition was established in 2010 when that year’s general election left the Conservatives ahead of Labour but short of an overall majority. On Feb. 3, 2012, Chris Huhne, one of the Liberal Democrats’ five cabinet ministers, resigned when he was charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. It was a serious charge born of a minor incident in 2003, when Huhne received a speeding ticket. Rather than risk being barred from driving (owing to his previous speeding offenses), Huhne allegedly persuaded his then wife, Vicky Pryce, to say that she had been driving the family car at the time of the speeding violation. Stories about this surfaced in 2011 when their marriage ended under acrimonious circumstances. A police investigation led to charges against both Huhne and Pryce.

A larger problem erupted for the coalition in July when 91 Conservative MPs voted against their own leadership on reform of the House of Lords. Successive governments had sought to replace the partly appointed, partly hereditary upper house of Parliament with a chamber that had a more democratic mandate. With some, though far from total, support in all the major parties, the government proposed that the Lords be 80% elected and 20% appointed. Those elected would serve a single 15-year term. On July 10, MPs voted on the issue. The principle was approved by a large majority, with 462 MPs voting in favour and 124 against the measure. The 91 Conservatives who opposed the bill made it clear that they would join with Labour in voting against a timetable for the bill. This meant that the timetable motion would fail, which in turn guaranteed that the bill’s opponents would be able to use filibustering tactics to block it. Rather than face the humiliation of defeat, the government withdrew the timetable motion and effectively killed its own bill.

The formal announcement of the bill’s withdrawal was made on August 6 by Nick Clegg, who was the deputy prime minister, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, and the minister responsible for constitutional issues. Reform of the House of Lords had been one of his party’s highest priorities. Clegg was angry that the Conservatives had failed to deliver enough support to ensure that the bill became law. He retaliated by withdrawing his party’s support for a separate constitutional measure that the Conservatives had been keen to enact, the reduction of the number of MPs in the House of Commons from 650 to 600. The new rules for drawing constituency boundaries that would have been required with the reduction also would have benefited the Conservatives (or, as the Conservatives argued, removed bias against them in the existing rules). Clegg said that the two reforms composed a balanced package that should stand or fall as a whole. Because the Conservatives had been unable to deliver a reform of the House of Lords, the Liberal Democrats would henceforth oppose this reform of the House of Commons. On November 15 for the first time, voters chose 41 police and crime commissioners to oversee the same number of police forces in England (excluding London) and Wales, though the turnout of fewer than 15% of eligible voters was the lowest for any series of national elections in British history.

Meanwhile, the fallout continued from the scandals involving News International. A number of senior figures were charged with a range of offenses, ranging from phone hacking (including Rebekah Brooks, former CEO of News International, and Andy Coulson, former editor of the News of the World and subsequently Cameron’s media adviser) to conspiracy to pervert the course of justice by removing computers and concealing them from the police (including Coulson, Brooks and her husband, Charlie, as well as other former News of the World executives) and perjury (Coulson, for evidence that he had given during the trial in 2010 of a leading left-wing Scottish politician).

On November 29 Lord Justice Brian Leveson, who had led a government-commissioned inquiry into the scandal, published his 2,000-page report. He strongly criticized sections of the press for their behaviour over many years and proposed a far tougher and more independent system of regulation to deter and punish intrusive, inaccurate, and defamatory journalism. He proposed that the punishments could include fines of up to £1 million (about $1.6 million). His overall design was accepted in principle by the main political parties and newspaper publishers; however, there were divisions over his call for a new law to ensure that the new regulatory system conformed to that design. Many MPs in all parties offered support for a new law, but it was opposed by Cameron and by the newspaper publishers, who argued that a statutory framework was incompatible with the principle of a free press. At the end of 2012, efforts were still under way to seek a consensus on a system that would be both independent and effective.

The BBC also faced widespread criticism, and a decline in public trust, over the actions of one of its flagship television news programs, Newsnight. First, the program was accused of having suppressed an inquiry into alleged sex crimes by one of the BBC’s most prominent personalities, Jimmy Savile, who died in 2011; then it was widely condemned for running a false story alleging that a former senior Conservative figure (who was not named by the BBC but whose identity quickly emerged on the Internet) had molested young boys at a children’s home in Wales. The second incident led to the resignation of the BBC’s director general, George Entwistle, only weeks after he had taken over the post from Mark Thompson.

Economic Affairs

The U.K.’s economy struggled to recover in 2012. Initial estimates indicated that the economy had contracted in the first two quarters of the year—thus suffering a “double-dip” recession, following the recession of 2008–10—before recovering slightly in the second half. Other data appeared to suggest a less-bleak picture. Unemployment began falling in the spring of 2012 and ended the year below 2.5 million, down from a peak of 2.7 million at the start of the year. Many of the new jobs were part-time, however, an indication that the labour market was not in decline but suggesting very slow growth.

The Bank of England sought to support recovery with further rounds of quantitative easing (QE) in February and July. This action increased the money supply as the bank purchased financial assets from the major commercial banks. The bank’s governor, Mervyn King, said that the program of QE, which had started in 2009, had prevented a far deeper economic slump. The bank’s critics said that the commercial banks had used too much of the money to restore their balance sheets and too little to increase lending and that QE had therefore done less than it should to stimulate the economy. Meanwhile, the bank retained the historically low base interest rate of 0.5% throughout 2012. Inflation fell from 4% at the start of the year to just over 2% at the end.

In his annual budget on March 21, George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, reduced the top rate of income tax from 50% to 45%. He offset this step, however, with a higher stamp duty on the most expensive homes and measures to reduce tax avoidance by the wealthy. Osborne argued that these changes would support enterprise and end up extracting more tax overall from the wealthiest people. Opinion polls, however, showed that the symbolism of the cut in the top rate of tax, paid by people earning more than £150,000 (about $240,000) a year, was politically damaging—especially because Osborne also had announced a measure to phase out some tax privileges of pensioners with modest incomes.

The reputations of senior bankers, already damaged by the combination of their role in the buildup to the financial crisis that started unfolding in 2007–08 and the continuing high bonuses paid to a small number of traders and senior executives, received a further blow when Bob Diamond resigned on July 3 as chief executive of Barclays PLC. His resignation was prompted by a fine on Barclays of £290 million (about $455 million) for having manipulated LIBOR, the London Interbank Offered Rate—a little-known but vitally important interest rate that governed a vast number of financial transactions directly or indirectly. Although Diamond insisted that he had been unaware of any improper activity, his position, and his remuneration (he was reported to have £20 million [about $32 million] in share options, as well as an annual salary of £1.35 million [about $2.1 million]), made him a target for widespread criticism that ultimately made his position untenable.

Foreign Affairs

The U.K. withdrew 500 troops from Afghanistan in 2012, ahead of the complete withdrawal planned for 2014. During the year 43 British troops lost their lives, bringing the total of British forces killed in Afghanistan since 2001 to 438. On October 14 five Royal Marines were charged with murder following the death of an insurgent whom they had captured.

On February 12 Foreign Secretary William Hague said that Syria’s Bashar al-Assad had lost the right to lead his country. Hague announced that the U.K. would recognize the Syrian National Council instead. Through the year Hague also supported a number of measures taken by the European Union to isolate the Assad regime and provide humanitarian assistance to the people of Syria. Moreover, he worked with other members of the UN Security Council to persuade Russia and China to support tougher UN action in Syria. Hague, however, resisted calls for military intervention in the crisis.

Closer to home, relations with the rest of the EU became more strained as government ministers stepped up their campaign to “repatriate” to London powers held by the EU. On July 12 Hague announced a “Review of the Balance of [EU] Competencies,” with the aim of compiling a list of demands of the EU to allow various powers to return to the British Parliament. On October 15 Theresa May, the home secretary, announced that she intended to exercise Britain’s right to opt out of 130 EU measures on human rights and law and order. Among the steps to be taken was withdrawal from the European Arrest Warrant, which provided for automatic extradition for those facing criminal prosecution.

On October 31, ahead of negotiations on the EU’s budget for 2014–20, the government lost a vote in the House of Commons on Cameron’s proposal that EU spending be allowed to increase only by the level of the inflation rate (in contrast with the majority of EU governments that wanted a real-terms increase). Labour MPs combined with a minority of Conservatives to demand a real-terms reduction in EU spending. The vote was advisory but embarrassing for Cameron.

Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland

On January 10 Alex Salmond, Scotland’s first minister, announced his plans to hold a referendum on Scottish independence in 2014. Following negotiations, Cameron and Salmond signed an agreement on October 15 on the details. The prime minister agreed to Salmond’s timing of the vote and to the wording of the referendum question. Cameron also concurred that the voting age for the referendum should be lowered to 16. However, Salmond had to relinquish his demand for a second question that would have given the Scots the option of backing more powers for the Scottish Parliament if a majority of Scots rejected full independence. Opinion polls at the time of the Cameron-Salmond agreement found majorities of up to two-to-one against independence and for retaining the union with the rest of the U.K.

No equivalent pressure was seen in Wales, where Labour regained its traditional domination of the political scene, gaining control of eight councils in local elections in May and leaving Plaid Cymru, Wales’s nationalist party, with barely one-fourth as many councillors as Labour and without control of any councils.

On June 26 and 27 the queen visited Northern Ireland as part of her Diamond Jubilee. The visit was notable for her public handshake with Martin McGuinness, Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister, who had been active in the Provisional Irish Republican Army in 1979 when the IRA murdered Lord Mountbatten, the uncle of Philip, duke of Edinburgh, the queen’s husband. The handshake represented a further stage in the process of peaceful reconciliation that was initiated by the signing in 1998 of the Good Friday Agreement, which brought the war in Northern Ireland to an end.

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